I’m just gonna plug 3blue1brown’s channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk) as he has an extremely in-depth series on how neural networks function down to the actual maths, and he works to try and ease you into it as best as possible.

If you are interested in the nitty gritty I implore you to start there and get really interested in it before fully diving into the absurdly dense text and courses about it.

okay legit i dont think the video is bad nor gay it was just the first short word i could think of to comment when he asked cause he really seemed like he needed a comment, i liked the video and everything

Only the best adapted organisms/code survive. In CGP Grey’s example it was testing the ability to distinguish bees and threes. In evolution it is testing the ability to pass on your DNA. Only the best organisms for their environment are allowed to continue on to the next cycle, where again the same tests happen, producing creatures that are better and constantly more adapted to their environment. As always, nature seems to have the solutions figured out and we’re just getting better at copying it 🙂

In fact, this specific type of machine learning is called a “genetic algorithm” or “evolutionary algorithm”. Other types of machine learning, such as neural networks/deep learning, work differently to this.

EDIT: I should clarify, neural networks/deep learning can still be done with genetic algorithms. They usually aren’t, though; they’re usually done with a form of gradient descent.

Videos like these show us that we’re further off from those AIs than the current popular mindset believes. When that time does come, they will demonstrate their intelligence as a virtue, and we will voluntarily follow them. Because really, there is no us and them, as crazy as that may seem. The bots ARE us, and we are the bots. An intelligent being will see that, and many other things. There’s nothing to worry about. The real fear is limited AI. AI that is only good at one thing, but is super good at that thing. Never self aware, but superior to any human in a given task. The hope is that well rounded, smart AIs will be able to reign these limited AIs in. China is developing AIs similar to what youtube has, but solely for the purposes of political repression and censorship. This is a disturbing possibility for limited AI. On the other hand, limited AI can be used for specific medical tasks. So really, like all tools, its what we make of them. I think that AIs are our only hope, because humans are gonna nuke themselves if they keep running themselves for much longer. Our technology outpaced our ape brains somewhere around industrialization and the species can’t be trusted to hold its own guns anymore. Muskets and canon balls were about as much as we could handle. Anything more is giving a chimp a loaded handgun, and with the nuclear age, that guns safety was taken off. I welcome our AI overlords. The age of the meatbags must come to an end.

@Blazing Nipples. Right, I don’t fear the self-aware general AI of the future that can solve problems that we don’t even know need solving. It’s the idiot machine that’s only goal is something benign until it begins working out how to carve up humanity and the planet to better achieve its goal. It’s not smart enough to reason with, and hasn’t figured out that if it destroys the future for higher gains now it’s going to end up worse off.

Wait a minute, that sounds familiar. Oh god. What have we done?

AIs that are better than humans at improving humanity is humanity’s only hope.

There’s a field in Computer Science called Evolutionary computation, and it’s being used for machine learning. My friend who’s a research assistant at MIT believes that Evolutionary computation will be critical in the future for machine learning, so you’re definitely on to something.